In the US today, we are at a huge disadvantage on all three fronts. We have weak social movements and both our electoral system and our state institutions are highly undemocratic, and thus systematically favor our adversaries. In my opinion, this means that we have three strategic imperatives: (1) we need to build social power; (2) we need to democratize our electoral system; and (3) we need to democratize our state institutions. (Since the focus here is on elections, I won’t comment on 3). As everyone has said a million times, we need to get money out of elections. But we’ve also got to redesign the electoral system in order to lay the foundation for a genuine multi-party system, because nothing short of that will give voters the leverage they need to hold candidates and incumbents accountable. That leverage derives from the credible threat to cast one’s ballot for an alternative to the two dominant parties, other than simply not voting at all (the currently dominant choice in virtually every election). Making it easier to vote via reforms such as the Motor Voter act, and beating back voter ID laws, is important, but even if everyone were registered, most people would continue to abstain because elections give them such limited leverage over candidates and incumbents.

Neither of those reforms will be possible, however, if we don’t first build social movements that are willing and able to exercise power in such a way that social and political elites (of every stripe) conclude that they’d better reform the electoral system if they don’t want to experience more social and political instability. This is how democratization has always occurred. Operating primarily within the institutional constraints of the electoral system only serves to reinforce those constraints. We can’t abandon the electoral arena, but we’re not going to democratize it or have influence over it if we don’t remain truly independent – and operate primarily outside – of it. So to the degree that we engage elections, we have to do so from a position of autonomy and strength and pick our battles wisely, and as much as possible, on our terms; which means we can’t make them a priority over social movement building.

This brings me back to the very special circumstances of the Wisconsin recall. Not only was it an unnecessary election of choice on a terrain where we were at a huge disadvantage (analogous to challenging someone to a duel and then showing up unarmed), but it also diverted the focus of a very tenuous potential movement that had not yet gained its feet or consolidated a sense of its own autonomous power. For me, the most inspiring and promising aspect of the Uprising was that it turned the typical relationship between “leaders” and “followers” on its head, which I think explains much of the euphoria people experienced. But before that was really consolidated and channeled into a revitalization of the labor movement or the building of grassroots power at the community level, it was instead channeled into a traditional electoral process that looked up to, and handed the responsibility off to, someone else – a candidate. That candidate, moreover, embodied all the problems with the electoral and party systems, someone who had already lost to Walker 19 months earlier, who offered no alternative vision, and who in fact had used Walker’s legislation to squeeze public sector workers in Milwaukee. The recall was simply another exercise in “throwing the bum out,” a negative kind of motivational tactic that is hardly inspiring, and which had the added burdens of a lackluster candidate and the fact that a majority of voters regarded it as an illegitimate way of responding to Walker’s policies.

The recall was clearly a spontaneous, grassroots initiative that created a level of momentum that was hard to ignore or resist among opponents of the Walker agenda. But I think that speaks to a couple of things. One is that most people have no experience of movement politics and it’s therefore not part of their worldview, much less at the forefront of their minds when thinking “what next?” They are, however, familiar with elections, and it’s almost a knee-jerk inclination to resort to them as the only method of doing politics and the only expression of democracy. Elections present a very tangible and short-term goal, and are therefore more attractive to most people than the pain-staking, drawn-out and less well defined work of building social power. But part of this deeply ingrained habit is also the willingness to be led, rather than lead – the idea that we can solve most of our problems simply by getting rid of the “bad guy” and replacing him with a “good guy.” This is why, even when we “win,” we typically sit back and watch and only get mobilized again, if at all, until the next election rolls around.

My hope is that we learn from this defeat by coming to a better understanding of the proper place of elections, which will continue to be an arena of defeat if we don’t make building social power our first priority. If we learn that lesson, I think we will have made huge strides, and the recall will turn out to have been an enormous opportunity. My fear is that most people, if they haven’t joined the ranks of the disillusioned, will instead focus on the next election as the answer to “what next?”.

I don’t doubt that the electoral arena is an infertile terrain on which to fight for social and economic justice. Thanks to Republican initiatives, it’s becoming more so. But the other terrain doesn’t look so fertile either. It’s not just the electoral arena that favors the privileged. That’s why disruptive protest is so rare and why it so often fails when it does happen. That doesn’t mean people should abandon protest or movement building. But neither should they give up on electoral politics. Again, I think it’s a false choice. Rather than cede the electoral arena as hopeless terrain, we must struggle to reshape it and, through institutional changes, make it more rather than less even.

Let me add that your comment usefully highlights the crucial question of how movements gain leverage and succeed in accomplishing at least some of their goals. That, it seems to me, is the crux of a lot of the recent debate. Piven and Cloward had a theory, and it was a theory in which electoral politics did play a role. (Indeed, if they thought electoral politics was unimportant or hopeless, they wouldn’t have been involved in promoting the 1993 Motor Voter Act.) Now they might be wrong, or their theory might need revision, but I worry that some of the people who are advocating protest *instead* of elections lack any theory at all about how protest will get them what they want. Of course, a person who is committed to an ethic of ultimate ends doesn’t need a theory; she need only say, “Here I stand; I can do no other.” Like Luther, she does what she thinks is right and leaves the results with the Lord. But then protest is no longer a means; it has only exemplary value.